Beaconator

Everything flows to the drain. The drain is the block you point at and press the button on, and it is the only place in the network that means anything: every current exists to get an item there. The sources and plates did not know that. They were worked out by following each run from whichever end it happened to be stored at, and a run is stored in the order it was drawn or laid, so half of them pointed the wrong way. That is where the sources pushing away from the middle came from, and the plates dropped into the middle of a straight stretch where nothing was meeting anything.

• They are worked out on the tree of blocks rooted at the drain now, walked from every dead end down to the middle, so downstream means downstream everywhere and a plate only lands where two currents genuinely meet. There is a test that checks every single fitting of a real perimeter gets closer to the drain, which is the check that was missing.
• Nothing is placed on the drain itself. It is the end of the line: a source there has nowhere to push but backwards.
• Water you already poured counts. Before drawing a fitting the mod asks the world which way the water in that block is already going, and if it is already heading for the drain there is nothing to propose: the channel works as built. Same for a plate that is already down. A finished stretch stops being drawn, the way a dug stretch already did.

Two rules the channel now keeps everywhere. Both come from building one rather than drawing one, and both are checked against a whole perimeter in the tests.

• No two sources ever touch. Water next to water is one pool with no current in it, which is the one way to build this that moves nothing at all. There is always a plate between one source and the next.
• No block of channel is left empty. Every single one ends up with water in it or a plate on it. Water reaches seven blocks past its source whatever the spacing says, so anything beyond that gets a plate rather than a bare block of ice, which is the hardest thing in a finished network to find once drops start going missing. Big Culo: 8,514 blocks of channel, 7,417 wet, 1,097 plated, nothing empty. Widening the source spacing now trades buckets for plates instead of thinning the channel out.
• Where the two rules disagree, the border wins: a gap on a chunk border is filled with water, never with a plate.
• No more plates in threes. Two branches ending a block apart asked for a plate each and got them. Past the first, they were cutting a current that had already been cut.

Chunk borders. Flowing water pushes an item every tick; bare ice only keeps the speed it already had, and a chunk that unloads and comes back does not give it back. Out at the far end of a perimeter, unloaded is the normal state, so the channel now treats a border as the one part of the network that is not a matter of taste.

• A source on the last block before every border, with the spacing restarting there, so the item crosses under power instead of coasting. Big Culo: 532 crossings, thirteen buckets more than the old spacing, because the count restarts rather than adding to it.
• A plate never lands on either side of a border. One that would has walked back upstream to the first free block. Same job, one block earlier.
• A corner on a border gets a red post and a cross on the map, and is left where it is: moving it means moving the run and every trip through it. Big Culo has three.
• The Cost tab counts the borders, in green when they are all under moving water.

The plates go where the bill was already charging for them: one block upstream of every source, where two currents meet, plus one at the end of each run. The bill said eleven hundred and the world drew twenty nine; now they are the same plates. Sources are all placed before any plate is, so a plate on a block two runs share cannot take the block the other run's source needed.

Ghost blocks, and the plates are part of the schematic now. Walk up to a plate and the mark turns into an actual pressure plate, the block with its own model and its own texture, sitting in the square it goes in. The game draws it, the same way a schematic mod does. Step back and it is a post again, because a plate seen from four hundred blocks away is nothing at all.

• It disappears when you place it. A ghost is a thing that is missing, so the moment the plate is in the world the mod stops drawing one there, and a finished stretch of channel looks finished. Same for a source once the water is in. That is the whole reason to draw them.
• Assisted placement handles plates. They are part of what the plan wants now, so easy place puts one in your hand and lets you place it where the network asked for one, and with strict placement on it stops you putting one anywhere else. Only while the plan has a channel: a perimeter with no water lines has no opinion about your plates. Water is still yours to pour, a bucket not being a block placement.
• A source stays a translucent box, block sized and at the height water sits at. Fluids do not go through the block renderer at all, so there is no block to ask the game for.
• Not on 26.x. The single block call the rest of this rides on does not exist there any more. The marks stay marks on that jar; everything else, the schematic included, is identical.

Following Litematica no longer talks over it. Mirroring their easy place toggle wrote a line of our own on the action bar, which is where they had just written theirs, so pressing their key showed their message and then ours on top of it. It syncs quietly now. The state is on the HUD.

Full notes: https://github.com/CodeW4VE/Beaconator/releases/tag/v2.3.0